dinsdag 29 september 2009

Knight: Freedom as fact and criterion

Knight merkt scherpzinnig op dat we Adam Smiths houding tegenover de overheid in de context moeten zien van de kwaliteit van de regering en parlement destijds. Men sprak van het "rotten-borough Parliament" en Thackeray maakte volgend gekruid rijm over de Hanoveriaanse koningen:

Vile George the First was reckoned;
Viler still was George the Second;
And what mortal ever heard
Any good of George the Third!
When George the Fourth to Hell descended,
Thank the Lord the George's ended.

Knight: Social science and the political trend

"The whole West-European social mind is tired of thinking and of argument which seems to lead nowhere." (Knight, 1934, p 26)

"The first business of a political leader is to keep on being a political leader, and his acts and words are to be appraised solely from the point of view of their effectiveness to that end."

dinsdag 8 september 2009

Knight on principles

The plea of Communism, like that of Christianity, is justice, under absolute authority, ignoring freedom. (The former does extol progress, and progress through science, both of which Christianity despised; by the same argument. Communism is overtly less devoted to law and tradition, more openly claims the right to ignore or break the law.)

Knight on politics

Knight expresses concern about the influence in democratic politics of the capacities for public persuasion and political organization, which he maintains are "'more unequally distributed among men by nature than is economic ability or power of any other kind", "tend more strongly to cumulative increase through their own exercise" and correlate poorly with "competence to counsel and to lead". (Knight, 1935, Economic theory and nationalism", 277)

Frank Knight's ethics of competition

Economic and other activities will always be organized in all possible ways, and the problem is to find the right proportions between individualism and socialism and the various properties of each and to use each in its proper place (1923, p58)

"in the conditions of real life no possible social order based upon laissez faire policy can justify the familiar ethical conclusions of apologetic economics (1923, p 49)

"'Giving the public what it wants' ususally means corrupting popular taste (1923, p57)

"The ownership of personal or material productive capacity is based upon a complex mixture of inheritance, luck, and effort, probably in that order of relative importance." (p 56)

zondag 6 september 2009

Frank Knight on Freedom of want

In any case freedom from want is no freedom; it means the right to consume without producing, implying coercion of somebody else to do the opposite thing. That is the opposite of free association. This, I repeat, does not deny the right in question, but its nature and extent ought surely to be discussed on the merits of the policy issues raised, and not begged by an indefensible definition.

.....

But freedom-from-want, stated as a social imperative, without reference to definition or limition or method of provision, opens the door to assertion of claims and policies that run into the impossible and the fantastic. The consequence, offering the highest bid for the votes of the "disadvantaged", or "forgotten men", identified by themselves or by self-appointed spokesmen.